Portland city clerk: Officials will review every single ballot

Portland City Clerk Kathy Jones just announced that, after more than three hours, all of the nearly 20,000 mayoral ballots have now been scanned into the computer system. She also said elections officials will look at every single one of those ballots to make sure the computer software being used to retabulate votes today has read them right.

“Once this [scanning] is done, we’ll be doing the review,” Jones announced. “We’ll be reviewing over 19,000 ballots. This will be the next process.”

That promises to be much more time consuming than if they reviewed a sample size of a few hundred or even a few thousand just to verify the system seems to be working. So buckle in, Portlanders. This’ll be a long afternoon.

Here’s where we are now: City officials working alongside elections consultants from TrueBallot have fed the ballots into five scanners, which saved images of those ballots to a computer software program. The system is currently, at this very moment, processing those images.

When that’s done, elections officials will eyeball each ballot image and compare it to what the computer system registered for votes. Assuming they all match up, we’ll move on to the retabulation process, in which the computer will reallocate the second choice votes of lower ranked candidates to higher ranked candidates through several rounds of “instant runoffs.”

If you’ve been following my posts all day, you know all of this already.